Had to restore site, when it came back it has index.php in the urls, how do I get rid of the index.php

Question

Would like to say thank you up front for your help!!! I have magento 1.4.0.1, I AM NOT A COMPUTER GEEK by any stretch of the word. I do not have a developer so if someone can help answer this being very specific, step by step I would really appreciate it!!

I was trying to get an Amazon payment button on our site. To make a long story short, I had to restore the site, when the site was back up and functioning in the URL's Index.php was present.

/index.php/admin/dashboard/

index.php/womens-gifts/purse-hooks.html

Since this has happened I also have 6800 NOT FOUND errors on Google webmasters. Please for customer friendly circumstance and the Holidays coming I need to get this off. I have spoke to our server support and they informed me that there was 3 access points .htaccess file code.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|public|\.txt)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1

Can somebody help me please. However then they said if I made a mistake I could do something major to the site and I found this site, so I am hoping to get some help, help that I can understand, Thanks Again Tracy

Answer 1

There are 2 things to do:

1. check your .htaccess (seems that you already tried that)

   a. Do you use Apache as webserver? If it's Nginx then .htaccess is not used

   b. Some hosting companies override or disable .htaccess for security reasons

2. check that you have Use Web Server Rewrites = Yes under System/Configuration/General/Web/Search Engine Optimization